South Africa's first official farm expropriation

The South African government has ordered the first expropriation of a white commercial farm in a bid to redress apartheid-era racial landholding patterns. Pressure has been building up for faster redressing of a situation in which 90% of land is held by white farmers.

Government has recently hardened its stance over the slow pace of voluntary land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994. Officials said they would use the full power of post-apartheid laws which allow government to order land sales to speed up the process. Restitution is part of the land reform programme and allows blacks, many of whom were evicted from ancestral lands, to apply to have their rights restored or to ask for financial compensation. They can also seek government loans to purchase land.

Officials have been at pains to emphasize that land redistribution will be governed by law, and in most cases will rely on negotiation with landholders to arrive at a fair price for the farms being repossessed. Only when such negotiations have failed will government resort to expropriation and forced sale, they claim. Common disputes between sellers and potential buyers over land valuations have a been a big stumbling block to more movement over land reform than has so far been seen. Most analysts agree that it will be difficult for the government to achieve its target for black and mixed-race communities to own 30 percent of agricultural land by 2014.

Fatima Shabodien of the Women on Farms Program which lobbies on behalf of the rural poor
says that if farmers are not prepared to compromise, they risk popular pressure for land grabs similar to those in neighboring Zimbabwe. "Black South Africans have been too humble in the past," she said. "Farmers don't seem to realize that they are painting themselves into a
corner."

The owner of the 500 hectare farm earmarked for seizure, Hannes Visser, said he intends to contest the move. "I do not recognise the [restitution] claim on my land and cannot be forced to sell at the government's price. Should the courts turn out to be my final recourse, I will go that route," he said.

Provincial land-claims commissioner Blessing Mphela said expropriation is the last resort. Once he receives the expropriation notice, Visser will have 30 days to show cause to the minister of agriculture and land affairs why it should not be executed. Should he fail in that, no recourse remains apart from a possible high-court application, Mphela said.

The planned expropriation follows two-and-a-half years of inconclusive negotiations on the value of the property, with Visser wanting R3-million and the government offering R1,75 million, Mphela told reporters. "If land reform is not handled in a manner that will generate positive economic benefits to our people, then chaos becomes the substitute." He criticised some land owners for hindering the process and displaying attitudes "reminiscent of that of the previous white apartheid government".

"In South Africa, where dispossession of African people was much more brutal than any other in the region, the fruits of liberation have yet to be tasted by the majority of the rural population.
"Two-thirds of the country, including most of the best-quality land, remains in the hands of less than 60 000 people while 14-million blacks or Africans eke out a precarious existence in the former homelands and urban informal settlements." Mphela could not say if further expropriations are in the pipeline, but did not foresee this becoming the norm for land acquisition in the country.

Analysts said investors welcomed the need to erase the hugely uneven distribution of land, but memories of violent land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe several years ago will simply not go away. Nic Borain, an independent political analyst said there are fears frustration with
the slow pace of reform could lead to unrest. "When investors sit 8,000 kilometres away the difference between South Africa and Zimbabwe becomes a little obscured," said Borain, who is based in Cape Town.